


One Was Turning, One Was Standing Still

by waltzmatildah



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 10:59:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10718055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/pseuds/waltzmatildah
Summary: Addison rushes to Seattle post the season six finale. At a loss, she ends up by Alex's bedside...





	One Was Turning, One Was Standing Still

**\- minus thirty eight -**

 

 

 

 

The news filters along winding hallways in a steady push.

Surge and recede.

The world inverts. Black and white and freezing cold. People watch her walk with a detached curiosity. Nurses. Orderlies. People she's never met. Conversations grind to a halt as she moves about the hospital in a daze.

Her employment history is folklore.

Right now it feels like ice.

 

 

 

 

**\- minus thirty five -**

 

 

 

 

She doesn't remember leaving. She doesn't remember arriving.

She does remember hovering in an open doorway. Tentative. Trying.

The room is full. Full of noise. Full of people. It greets her as a wall and she knows without stepping forward that she won't ever penetrate its depths.

She has heard about the post-it.

The echoing laughter is mocking.

 

 

-

 

 

She seeks out solitude. Finds it in bitter coffee and one-sided ICU conversations full of snark and sarcasm and a desperate pleading that she'll never admit to.

Finds it in the slow curve of his lax fingers.

Finds it in memories of how they once felt on her skin.

 

 

 

 

**\- minus thirty three -**

 

 

 

 

She speaks at length with Teddy Altman. About chest tubes and blood loss and the relative benefits of continued sedation.

About not fitting in and about how pretending to be okay with that will only get you so far.

A trailer on a hill and a diamond discarded into the grey waters of the Sound.

 

 

-

 

 

There's a perpetually empty chair by his bedside. For friends. For family.

For her, despite the fact that she’s never really been either of those things.

At least, not to him.

And it's the only reason that the hard plastic back feels at all comfortable against the soft curve of her spine.

 

 

 

 

**\- minus thirty two -**

 

 

 

 

Despite assurances that he'll sleep through the next few hours she startles awake to find him staring back at her.

Eyes rolled to sideways in his head and unblinking.

That he’s not fighting the vent is telling.

She stands, panics, flaps uselessly.

Sinks once more to seated and wraps clammy hands around his upper arm in a way that is meant to be reassuring.

Reassuring for whom she is yet to determine.

He's crying silently and so is she. From that she concludes, somewhat reluctantly, that it's probably neither of them.

 

 

 

 

**\- minus eighteen -**

 

 

 

 

He grows angry and bitter. Pain and medication lowering his carefully constructed defences until they're laid out flat against the slippery surface between them. She's the only one brave enough to call him on it.

He grunts. Shovels lime jello into his mouth with a fervor that speaks of more than just hunger and refuses to meet her gaze.

Spits out recriminations and self pity instead.

Rescinds them almost immediately, stuttered and stammering with panicked haste.

 

 

-

 

 

She holds his hand while he sleeps. For seconds, minutes, fleeting instances at a time. Whispered words and rushed apologies that are not hers to give.

When he wakes she offers a ghosted smile. Slides her eyes back to the printed ink of her novel and pretends she's managed to move past the title page.

He no longer questions her presence. He's too afraid of the answer, that much is already painfully clear.

 

 

 

 

**\- minus seven -**

 

 

 

 

She runs out of excuses to stay on a Tuesday afternoon. Sifts through the heady contents of her brain in search of something plausible and comes up empty handed.

The feeling is achingly familiar.

Her flight is booked for the early evening.

Sunset.

Chapter's end.

And leaving Seattle gets harder every time she does it.

 

 

-

 

 

She offers him a tentative goodbye. Stands in the doorway to his room, propped against the frame and teetering on too tall, too skinny, too impractical heels that threaten to betray her confidence at a moment's notice.

He locks his eyes on hers. Offers a shrug and a casual _whatever_ in return.

She's come to expect very little else.

 

 

 

 

**\- minus six -**

 

 

 

 

He calls.

His voice, shocking.

She's not expecting it. Words form and die on the tip of her tongue before she can speak them.

He apologises. Hangs up. She stares at her cell phone and can't quite co-ordinate the movements required to call him back.

Can't quite fathom whether she even wants to.

 

 

-

 

 

She holds out for nine hours and four minutes. Wakes him and doesn't really care.

The shock is all his this time.

 

 

 

 

**\- one -**

 

 

 

 

She touches down as he's being discharged. An ending and a beginning and a _maybe this time_ all in one.

They reunite over a crack in the sidewalk. Tentative at twenty paces.

She breaks the deadlock because she's sick and tired of games and waiting and lip stick stains on a single wine glass pushed to horizontal in her kitchen sink.

He grins. Lopsided.

She wipes it from his face with her tongue. Leaves him breathless and shaking and something that tastes a lot like _hopeful_.

 

 

-

 

 

He follows her back to a hotel that might as well be The Archfield but isn't.

She has a first floor room and they take the stairs. He doesn't protest and she doesn't ask questions. There are rules about what they're doing and she's pretty sure asking questions is against every single one of them.

His fingers bouncing down her ribcage is most definitely not.

 

 

 

 

**\- four -**

 

 

 

 

He's starting to stay awake long enough that a change of clothes is required. She volunteers to run the gauntlet on his behalf.

Chickens out before the car door closes behind her.

Heads to Sears instead. And the last male she bought underwear for she ended up marrying. It takes a martini in the hotel bar to get her back up the twenty two steps that separates them.

 

 

-

 

 

She drops the shopping bag on the mattress by his left knee, bursts a small bubble of satisfaction as he startles to awake with a frown and a breathless _Addie_ that tingles all the way to her toes.

That the first thing he pulls from the crackling plastic is a scrap of black lace does nothing to dampen her flames.

 _Look at that..._ he grins, sly, shameless, _... just my size..._

 

 

 

 

**\- seventeen -**

 

 

 

 

They don't talk about the nightmares.

The proverbial dead-girl-with-the-bullet-between-her-eyes in the room. She's heard the stories. Chinese whispers and tin cans strung between taut fibres.

 

 

 

 

**\- thirty three -**

 

 

 

 

She is offered a position at Seattle Presbyterian. She has no idea if Richard knows she's still in town, has no idea if she wants him to.

Has no idea how she'd turn him down if he made her a counter offer.

Which he would. That's the one thing she _does_ know.

She leaves the paperwork on the bathroom floor, the one location in the room that she's confident he'll visit.

Discarded parchment and smudged ink amid the puddled towels.

 

 

-

 

 

He disappears mid-afternoon.

She panics but she'll never tell him that. An early evening phone call from her ex-husband's post-it wife precedes his return. A garbled message of diluted tequila consumption and an impromptu existential therapy session across a faded bar runner.

The tub is full to overflowing with pearl bubbles by the time he arrives. The lock on the bathroom door engaged with a defiant shove.

Ever the Queen of Passive Aggressiva.

 

 

 

 

**\- fifty one -**

 

 

 

 

He heads back to work part time. Clears psychological evaluations that he refuses to speak about and attends check ups with Teddy Altman that she's not invited to.

They're still living in a hotel that is too much but not enough like The Archfield. And he still offers her a lopsided grin as she drops her handbag at the door and crosses the room to thread her fingers through hair that needed trimming three weeks ago.

And for now that will have to be enough and more than she ever expected all in the same breath.

 

 

 

 

**\- sixty seven -**

 

 

 

 

He leaves a flyer for an apartment on the bathroom floor. She toes at it cautiously as the thrum of her heart races to the beat of a thousand drummers in her chest. The symbolism is not lost on her.

An impatient cough breaks through the fog.

Delaying gratification was never his strong suit.

His shoulders rise, a non-verbal _whatever_ that is so achingly frustrating and definitively _him_ in the same fleeting millisecond.

She feigns casual; shrugs back, tries and fails to fight the slow spread of a wide grin.

Feels the long displaced parts of her fall into something resembling a rhythm she'd long given up as lost.  



End file.
